Page:Studies in Irish History, 1649-1775 (1903).djvu/51

Cromwell in Ireland thus of Drogheda in his letter to the King:—"On this occasion Cromwell exceeded himself and anything I have ever heard of in breach of faith and bloody inhumanity. The cruelties exercised there for five days after the town had fallen would make as many several pictures of inhumanity as the Book of Martyrs, or the relation of Amboyna." What was this relation of Amboyna? It was a massacre which had taken place in the East Indies nearly fifty years earlier, in which every soul in a small garrison, men, women, and children, had been done to death, Hume tells us, "with the most inhuman tortures."

Another testimony of the time comes from the narrative of an officer in Clothworthy's regiment, who up to a few months before had served against the Irish. This is what he says:—"But the garrison being overpowered were all hewed down in their ranks, and no quarter given for twenty-four hours to man, woman, and child, so that not a dozen escaped out of the town of townspeople or soldiers." Ormond and this officer of Clothworthy's regiment were serving at the time within twenty miles of Drogheda, and their testimony is worth that of a thousand Carlyles or Froudes, who wrote more than two hundred years later. 39